Welcome to our new website on SharePoint 2013

We have just published our new website built using Microsoft SharePoint 2013. I’m pretty sure you’re very curious to hear how we built it.

A word of introduction

One of the things that we aimed at with our new website is to have it published as soon as possible after the public release of SharePoint 2013 and to use it during the upcoming weeks as a platform for us to show you what can be achieved with regard to building great public-facing website on SharePoint 2013. SharePoint 2013 has been released just a few hours ago, so I guess we did it. Keep in mind that it’s only the very first release of our website and we will be changing it and adding new functionality to it in the next weeks. With that, please be understanding but also have your eyes open, be critical and curious and, what’s most important, tell us what you think of our effort and the result.

The Requirements

When we were designing for our new website we defined some requirements to help us decide what we wanted to achieve. Some of those requirements are functional and some are technical. Following is an overview of the most important requirements that made it to this release.

Highly-optimized

On our previous website we used Mavention Flex Layout and other products from our WCM suite to optimize the site for the Internet. With the new version of our website we wanted to achieve at least the same result: being able to use all of the content management capabilities offered by the SharePoint platform and yet have a highly-optimized public-facing website.

All devices-friendly

When building our previous website we didn’t really spend time on optimizing the experience for mobile devices. A year and a half later, given the continuously increasing usage of mobile devices and the near release of Microsoft Surface, we thought that we could no longer get away with a single user experience.

Multilingual

In the last year and half we noticed that nearly the half of our visitors come from countries other than the Netherlands. In comparison, none of our content except for the majority of blog posts was presented in English. With that we decided that we had to provide better experience to our foreign visitors.

Fresh

Although our previous website didn’t feel dated yet, we thought that it was time for a new design: one that would allow us to support new devices and better present our corporate identity.

SharePoint 2013 showcase

Here at Mavention, SharePoint is the only thing we do: it’s our only focus and we strive to excel in it. With that we decided that we had to have a website that would showcase what SharePoint 2013 offers and to what extent we understand the new capabilities and can leverage them for building great public-facing websites.

How we did it?

We worked hard to have our new website released so quickly. So what did we and how did we do it?

We’ve done quite some work to achieve what you can see now and which is way too much for a single article. In the upcoming ‘Mavention.nl v3: How we did it?’ series we will step-by-step walk through what we’ve done: from the architectural choices to the implementation. Stay tuned!